It's finally finished! After two and a half years I've finished building my OI (I'm fully retired - can't tell you why it took so long).

" border="0" alt="">

It was my first strip-built kayak, but I made some changes to the original design: raised the fwd deck 1", keyhole cockpit with thigh braces, magnetic hatch hold-downs, waterproof finger holes in hatch covers, strip-built bulkheads with same pattern as on the deck, Redfish seat.

Thanks to: Jay Babina for an excellent design, to Rob Macks for his plans for magnetic hatch hold-downs and for other great ideas throughout his how-to book, to Vaclav Stejskal for his excellent how-to book, to Kurt Maurer's OI2 blog - loaded with good info, and of course to Nick for his excellent book and videos and this forum, and to all of you forum contributors whose advice stopped me about a dozen times from turning this project into a viking funeral.

Thanks for telling me about the all-important 10 foot rule.

The all-important First Scratch, compliments of Maine's "hard surface" launch sites

My next project may be to publish my building log, titled Murphy's Law: a story of building a cedar strip kayak.

Thanks to all of you,
Howie